Facebook Connect

So you’ve been looking at adding socialsign-on to your website. You’ve become acquainted with the social sign-on landscape, you’re familiar with the advantages of using social sign-on, and you’re ready to delve a little deeper into the subject.

Facebook recently got into trouble when it was revealed that they were behind a Google smear campaign. Essentially, Facebook hired a PR firm to get journalists and bloggers to write negative press about Google’s privacy policies and practices. The tactic backfired when some enterprising journalists did some research and found out that Facebook was behind the campaign.

Social sign-on is an authentication method available on many websites where a person uses their social networking account login credentials as identification to "sign on" to other web sites. In laymen's terms, it's what allows you to login to other sites using your Facebook ID and Password (or Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, etc). For a web site owner or administrator, there are many questions and concerns that need to be addressed about this relatively new technology. Below is a list of questions to ask before you decide to implement a social sign-on solution for your web site:

With Facebook joining the OpenID Foundation, and more and more websites integrating their services with other third-party websites via oAuth and OpenID, its quite obvious the future of the web is relying on these authorization technologies to provide a fluid end user experience. However, in order to understand exactly how this will impact end users, site owners, and content creators, first we have to explore exactly what these technologies do.

Facebook Connect allows users to log in and sign up for third-party apps, games, websites, and services using only their Facebook account. This is essentially the end result of a set of APIs and the Open Graph protocol created by the social network for third-party developers and users to integrate and share content and communities.

Facebook and Open Graph have effectively begun the process of integrating the social network into the rest of the web. The question is, what does this mean for the future of media outlets, third-party websites and developers, and other, competing social networking environments?

You have found your voice on WordPress. Congratulations. But, without getting people to read it your blog will be as popular as an accordion player at a rock concert. There is no more perfect way to promote your blog than to use social plugins. Social plugins allow you to shamelessly proselytize your WordPress blog to attract social media socialites.

Back at the F8 Conference in April, Mark Zuckerberg announced the demise of Facebook Connect and the rise of what he called the “social graph.” The social graph is the idea that everything we do should be socially integrated on the web.